Today, many vehicles employ rear-view mirrors (at room and outside of vehicle) that are designed to enable an operator to see rearward, for example, to detect obstructions when in reverse as well as to see on-coming traffic from the rearward direction. The rear-view mirror enables an operator to view through a vehicle's rear window while continuing to face forward.
That is, an operator of a vehicle must recognize objects such as other motor vehicles move with respect to the vehicle being driven by the driver. Such as being the case, the driver must constantly review his or her surroundings to determine whether a desired path of travel is obstructed and, if the desired path is taken, it would cause a collision. Tools that assist a driver in reviewing the space surrounding the motor vehicle include the rear view mirror and the side rear view mirrors. These mirrors allow the driver to review the surroundings generally disposed behind the driver without the driver having to turn his or her head more than a minimal amount. Locations commonly referred to as “blind spots (or dead zones)” exist on either side of the motor vehicle. These blind spots are spaces that are not visible to the driver when the driver is looking in the mirrors. Therefore, the viewing of these blind spots requires the driver to turn his or her head to look to see if another motor vehicle of some other object has entered the blind spots. In certain cases, the driver must get off the vehicle to personally check or let other people check if there is no obstacle, causing inconvenience, fender bender or safety accident.
To overcome this problem, it is thus known to provide a camera device or an imaging sensor on a vehicle for providing an image of a scene occurring exteriorly or interiorly of the vehicle to a driver of the vehicle. That is, in addition to rear-view and side-view mirrors, many vehicles are recently being equipped with rear-view camera device. One motivation of equipping passenger vehicles with rear-view cameras is to enable an operator to view directly behind the vehicle when in reverse.